Originally published in: 22/01/2026
Dear One World Friends,
There has never been a more exciting or important time to be alive. The next 20 years will be the most consequential in human history as humanity decides whether it will usher in a world of Sustainable Super Abundance, or fall prey to the Great Filter Theory.
This past April, we published our first online book, where we concluded that if the dramatic, unprecedented advances in technology are used for the good of humanity, we can create a world of Sustainable Super Abundance, a post-scarcity world where humanity can bring an end to poverty, hunger, and even the need to work.
You can access our book here: The Great Transition
Or listen to this 15-minute Podcast of the Book
We wrote our book because when we first heard this idea of a post-scarcity world of high universal income, we thought that this idea was preposterous and decided to study it in depth.
After extensive research, our conclusion is clear: a world of radical abundance is technologically feasible. However, as we point out in the book, the path to this world of Sustainable Super Abundance will not be easy and is fraught with challenge and danger.
Indeed, it is very interesting to listen to the futurists today as they begin to absorb the idea of Super Abundance and begin to think about how we get from here to there.
Mo Gawdat and the Godfather of Abundance, Peter Diamandis, expect ten years of turbulence as the pace of change accelerates and we belatedly attempt to address these issues before eventually smoothing things out.
Lord Demis Hassibis is concerned that today’s fractured international environment is not conducive to bringing people together, but is hopeful that as our global society begins to understand that we are no longer suffering from an economics of scarcity or a zero-sum game, but rather are living into a world of abundance, those conflicts will hopefully be resolved.
The problem is that very few people understand how fundamentally different the period of change we are living through today is as compared with any other time in human history because the pace of change is accelerating so quickly.
Humanity has had difficulty keeping up with Moore’s Law where computing capacity doubled every two years or 32x over the course of a decade. It now seems as if computing capacity is doubling every six months or faster. That translates into a one million-fold increase in computing capacity over ten years as compared with 32x as we can see from this chart: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/6fe915de-040e-4590-b4b5-566331a6903d
Nor does this extraordinary increase in computing capacity take into account the impact of quantum computing: Quantum Computing
These are the stupendous numbers we had been following until we listened to this video with the original abundance thinker Peter Diamandis, and Elon Musk.
In minute 1:16 of this video Musk marvels at the Supersonic Tsunami coming our way and then explains how much difficulty he has in absorbing the accelerating pace of change:
“I don’t just have courtside seats I am on the court, and it still blows my mind, sometime multiple times a week. And so Just when I think wow, then its like two days later more wow,” To which Peter Diamandis replies, “Exponential Wow”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSNuB9pj9P8
Musk goes on to say that AI compute is racing ahead at 10x per year, which, if it persists for a decade at this level, translates into a 10 billion increase in AI compute as compared with the one million we mentioned above. He further clarifies that by 2030, 99% of the intelligence in the world will be machine intelligence.
If Elon Musk is having difficulty getting his head around the pace of change and the miracles it can spawn all of us can be excused for not being able to get our heads around the unprecedented pace of change coming our way.
However, we cannot and should not be excused from tackling the challenge of exponential technological change head-on and making every effort to understand the tech wave of opportunity or peril coming our way.
Those communities that prepare for the tech wave of opportunity have the potential to transform their communities into communities of abundance and those that willfully ignore this opportunity risk being left behind and being overwhelmed by the big wave turned tsunami.
Indeed, this was the other abundantly clear message to come out of this lengthy video. The participants commented that there is a “massive underreaction” to the technology opportunity coming our way. They said most people seem oblivious to the transformational changes coming our way. We agree with that view.
In minute 1:18:48, Peter Diamandis wonders about this massive underreaction.
“It is like we are headed to a Supersonic Tsunami, and every major CEO, economist and government leader should be like well what do we do?”
No one seems to be paying attention. No one can doubt that there is significant AI hype but there is very little serious-minded conversation from any quarter which explains the dimensions of the opportunity and challenge. Nor is there any real discussion of how we get from here to there.
“Here” being 193 competing nation-states armed to the teeth, spending 2.7 trillion dollars a year to defend against other human beings. And “there” being the post-scarcity, “Solved World” of abundance where no one has any need to work.
In this short video, Elon Musk explains that over the next 10 to 20 years, work will become optional: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FSQ0wMftrcg
As he looks out further into the future, say 40 to 50 years, he predicts money will disappear: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SwjwTTiNR5k
In this video, Lord Demis Hassibis founder of Google’s DeepMind whose primary goal is to apply AI to science and solve humanity’s big problems, tells us that after their success with Alpha-fold he believes we can bring an end to disease:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aXyxsIMOtTg
Finally, in this essay, Machines of Loving Grace, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, tells us that AI can help us cure cancer:
https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace
We believe that each of these future goals is definitely achievable, eminently achiveable…from a technological perspective. Homo Technologicas has been extremely successful.
However, Homo Sapiens or “wise humans,” have not been anywhere near as successful. Indeed this coming Tuesday, January 27th, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the organization created by Einstein and Oppenheimer in the 1940s in large part to measure humanity’s risk of extinction, will unveil its Doomsday clock.
The clock started in 1947 at seven minutes to midnight or Doomsday, expanded to 19 minutes to midnight with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the safest time ever and has been creeping closer and closer to midnight as our global community has fractured. A few years ago the Bulletin stopped measuring the risk in minutes and moved to seconds. Last year, the clock was moved up to one second closer to midnight to 89 seconds.
Living at the Hinge of History
The principal thinking behind Long Termism comes out of Oxford University. One of the first Oxford professors to put forward this view was Derek Parfit, who wrote in the final pages of On What Matters (2011) that, “We live during the hinge of history. Given the scientific and technological discoveries of the last two centuries, the world has never changed as fast. We shall soon have greater powers to transform, not only our surroundings, but ourselves and our successors. If we act wisely in the next few centuries, humanity will survive its most dangerous and decisive period. Our descendants could, if necessary, go elsewhere, spreading through this galaxy.”
Parfit subsequently made the same claim in even stronger terms during a talk sponsored by Giving What We Can at the Oxford Union in June 2015:
“I think that we are living now at the most critical part of human history. The twentieth century I think was the best and worst of all centuries so far, but it now seems fairly likely that there are no intelligent beings anywhere else in the observable universe. Now, if that’s true, we may be living in the most critical part of the history of the universe…(The reason) why this may be the critical period in the history of the universe is we are the only rational intelligent beings, its only we who might provide the origin of what would then become a galaxy-wide civilization, which lasted for billions of years, and in which life was much better than it is for most human beings. Well, if you look at the scale there is between human history so far and what could come about, its enormous. And what’s critical is that we could blow it, we could end it.”
Best regards,
Joe
